1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image processing device and an image processing method, which identify a region coinciding with a predetermined search condition in an input image by character recognition.
2. Related Art
Nowadays, because of factory automation or traceability enhancement, there is increasing a need to inspect or read a character added to a half-finished product or a product. An image processing device is frequently used for performing the character recognition for the purpose of print inspection or character read of the half-finished product or the product to meet such need. There is a demand to improve performance of the image processing device for performing such character recognition.
As to image processing concerning such character recognition, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2002-183667 discloses a character recognition device that sets any character set as a recognition target character set and quickly performs recognition processing at a high recognition rate based on linguistic information. Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2006-106931 discloses a character string search device that searches a position of an assigned character string in a grayscale image. Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2009-193159 discloses a region extraction program that can efficiently and correctly perform the character recognition to information expressed by a regular expression in which the number of characters varies.
During character recognition, a character string region may be falsely detected due to a noise or a deviation of a detection position. For example, in a case where the character string or the like across plural lines is identified, it is hard to remove the falsely-detected character string region. In such applications, sometimes the character recognition cannot properly be performed even if any one of the methods disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication Nos. 2002-183667, 2006-106931, and 2009-193159 is adopted.